I want to break a lance in favour of the younger generations. Specifically, I am not so much referring to twenty-somethings or those even younger, but rather to the thirty-to-forty-somethings, the so-called Millennials. This, let me preface, is unusual for me, because I consider them to be an unprepared generation, often uncultured despite wishing to appear otherwise, and highly conceited. Furthermore, adding fuel to the fire of my criticism is the fact that a large part of this demographic currently constitutes our “ruling class”, at all levels and in all fields. Having said that, let me explain the reason for this apparent change of heart on my part. In reality, these are the generations born around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, who grew up with the myth of a united Europe, of “perpetual peace” (as we too had believed). Unlike those born before that period, however, they were educated in schools and universities specifically tailored for them, with a new educational system that advanced hand in hand with neo-liberal economic thought. And it is precisely the latter, neo-liberalism, that has orchestrated a gigantic mystification of reality for the use and consumption of the new generations. Employing vast resources and systematically deconstructing the pre-existing reality, it has managed to render that reality alien even to those who had contributed to producing it or, at the very least, living it over the years. But let us proceed in order, to understand how this has happened over time.

The School System

This work of deconstruction started with the educational system, state schools, which was systematically destroyed in terms of both resources and teaching methodologies. A relentless campaign was waged to denigrate the role of the public sector (as with the rest of the State’s activities), using compliant or simply superficial media to push the message that the private sector was better, more efficient and more “in step with the times”. This occurred in both schools and universities. The latter witnessed a feeble protest movement named the “Pantera” (Panther), which ended in typical “Italian style”, that is, achieving absolutely nothing. It was directed against the reforms the then Minister Antonio Ruberti wished to introduce (December 1989). These reforms, among other things, envisaged the private financing of research and the entry of corporations onto university boards of directors. In practice, the beginning of the privatisation of universities. With the exception of a few amendments to the law conceded by Ruberti, the privatisation began. Schools underwent the same process. Especially with the reform desired by Minister Luigi Berlinguer (1996-98) which, through subsequent modifications by other Governments, reduced schools to branch offices of corporations. This process of “corporatisation” has been well explained by Pietro Ratto, notably in this interview. At the same time, school curricula were tampered with, through repeated attempts to eliminate the study of Latin, Greek and Philosophy, which fortunately failed. Obviously, it is no coincidence that this was repeatedly attempted, because these are subjects that encourage critical thinking and questioning the status quo—something the New World Order does not want, for obvious reasons. Instead, significant cuts were made to the study of History, because we must “forget” the past in order to live in an eternal present, without memory (except for various fabricated “fascisms” and “isms”, useful for stigmatising those who do not think as the mainstream dictates). Curricula were gradually changed and schools, along with universities, as we were saying, were increasingly transformed into businesses that have to balance the books. Headteachers have become accountants, and State funding varies according to the number of pupils attending the institutions. For this reason, the trend of no longer failing students has gradually taken hold, so as to avoid a probable haemorrhaging of pupils. We have even witnessed outright episodes of bullying and harassment directed at teachers, by both pupils and their parents. The school, once a place of formation (albeit criticisable in several respects), has been constantly stripped of content and educational authority, whilst simultaneously having every kind of blame dumped upon it regarding the behaviour of the pupils attending it. The university sector, where the private sector has barged in, is no better. Research is humiliated, and limited-enrolment faculties have been established where access was once free. Syllabuses have been simplified, partly because only the desired educational messages must be passed on (there are extremely valid textbooks that have been deliberately replaced with others, written from scratch), and partly because the “new” students are often incapable of understanding the texts that were once used for the syllabuses proposed by the “old guard” of lecturers. I experienced this directly myself towards the end of my university studies. As the so-called “barons” retired—who may well have been barons, but were very often academics of depth and quality nonetheless—universities replaced the teaching staff with their bag-carriers, or with “new” people formed in the wake of the new prevailing ideology. Obviously, this is not a generalisation that can be applied one hundred per cent, but it is undoubtedly largely correct. Very briefly, this is the school education received by the “youth”, i.e. those who grew up with the idea that Europe was an opportunity (as if it hadn’t been there before) to travel and educate oneself with specific programmes like Erasmus—the latter a true, untouchable totem for many of them. I personally met a woman (in her early thirties) who named her son Erasmus (sic.) and wanted (or so she told me) to name her unborn daughter Europa. The reason was that she had met her husband precisely thanks to this beautiful university exchange programme. It seems to me a more than valid reason to ruin two children’s lives. A bit like those in the past who named their children “Palmiro”, “Bettino” or “Benito”.

Europa Europa, everyone towards the Sun of the Future

The “differently young”, like yours truly, will almost certainly remember a nice television programme on Rai Uno, devised by Michele Guardì, Giorgio Calabrese and Mario Di Tondo and hosted by the Frizzi-Gardini duo, which was called “Europa Europa” (1988-1990, coincidentally). Who didn’t like the idea of a union, at least a spiritual and cultural one, of the European peoples? I certainly liked it, and like me so did countless others of my generation and previous ones too. A pity, though, that it was an illusion and we didn’t realise it. Even with broadcasts like the one I have just mentioned, the idea was slowly instilled in the masses that Europe was the promised land. None of us, or at least the majority of us, imagined that in reality it was a carefully prepared poisoned dish, featuring a single course: the economic one through which to govern the peoples. The chosen chef? Germany, of course.

Civil rights in exchange for social ones

The mainstream media—television, newspapers and the Internet—has for years bombarded public opinion with messages aimed, on the one hand, at normalising certain categories of people such as homosexuals, the LGBT community and those who had been unjustly humiliated and marginalised by society, and on the other, strongly advocating the progressive granting of civil rights, sacrosanct in the vast majority of cases, in favour of these categories. But it has taken great care not to highlight the fact that all this was obtained in exchange for so-called social rights, won through years and years of hard battles and fierce confrontations by previous generations. In practice, on the one hand, the message was passed that removing, for example, Article 18 of the Workers’ Statute was something inevitable, due to contemporary times in which the evolution of the economy dictated a “lean” and “mobile” labour market; but on the other hand, the right for homosexual couples to enter into a regular marriage was granted (again, for example). As if this latter, sacrosanct civil right were somehow compensatory for the theft committed on the social level. All this was cleverly orchestrated, aided and abetted by a political class that was at best inept, at worst colluding. Well, the youthful masses were mobilised to lend support to this voice, cleverly rallied via Internet platforms, with demonstrations of solidarity and support for these causes, just as had happened internationally for the protests organised in favour of the “Arab Spring” or the “Orange Revolution”. A pity the young didn’t do the same to maintain the social rights that have been constantly stripped away from them over the last few years, turning their own generation into a mass of unemployed people, destined to be on precarious contracts for life.

Greta, the “Gretins”, not forgetting… the “Sardines”

A fragile and (therefore) fickle and easily manipulable generation. This is the result of the constant work done by multiple international organisations on the youngest, exerting relentless pressure on their consciences through the social media now widely used by us all. Movements in favour of the environment were born, such as that of the seventeen-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg, a young girl who suddenly shot to international prominence precisely thanks to the massive hype generated by the global media for her climate protests, initially staged in front of the Riksdag in Stockholm. From mid-August 2018, she began a school strike until the Swedish elections in September, after which it became a regular fixture every Friday, thus launching the Fridays for Future movement which, above all, large masses of young people began to join. The latter were undoubtedly moved by good intentions (who could say that climate protection isn’t important?), but was the “Greta phenomenon” really just the endeavour of an unknown little girl who suddenly became a fully-fledged star received with great pomp by Heads of State and religious authorities? Only a fool, or the most manipulable of minds, could think so. That behind such a phenomenon lay the vast international industry manufacturing “green” technologies is fairly intuitive, even if not directly provable. Now, courtesy of the forced global shutdown of productive activities and means of transport, you will see that due to the subsequent drop in polluting particles in the air, people will say that “Greta was right”. It will be said that all productive technologies must be converted to “green”, without mentioning, however, that very often these pollute the environment more than traditional ones, as in the case of the required energy and the problem of the waste deriving from the disposal process of electric car batteries. Be that as it may, riding the emotional wave of the young Swede’s message, those political parties drawing on the idea of an environmentally compatible society have experienced a massive relaunch. The Greens, particularly in Germany, are a glaring example. In the 2017 federal elections, in fact, they had barely reached 8.9 per cent of the vote. Just two years later, at the European elections, they leaped to 20.5 per cent, decisively usurping the second position from the oldest social democracy in the world, represented by the SPD (which plummeted to 15.8 per cent), effectively taking its place in the preferences of the Germans in a hypothetical new governing coalition. And guess who voted in the majority for the green party par excellence? Bien sûr, young people in the 25 to 40 age bracket. Was für eine große Überraschung! as they would say around here (what a huge surprise!).

Berlin, du bist so wunderbar

Special attention regarding the German youth phenomenon should be reserved for the city of Berlin, a veritable social experiment in this regard (just as much as, again in my opinion, Italy is an experiment for mass phenomena deriving from emotional factors, highly instinctive and not at all rational). The German capital is in fact a catalyst (not by chance) for young people coming from all over the world. Truth be told, it has been for a long time, and for two very specific historical reasons. The first is that Berlin has always been considered a “libertine” city with loose morals. And this dates back to the end of the 19th century. The second is that the Wall created a highly peculiar micro-cosmos in the western part; given its isolation within the former GDR, it meant that only the young and dropouts wanted to live in the enclave. This was in exchange for considerable economic advantages and a wide margin of freedom due to the implicit complicity of the FRG (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) governments, who faced the non-secondary problem of keeping “alive” a city in which no German wanted to relocate. Therefore, they turned a blind eye, or even two, to glaring “anomalies” within the framework of state rules, as well as bankrolling West Berlin with a veritable river of cash and drugs precisely for this “social” purpose. In short, freedom galore, in every sense, which attracted “free spirits” from all over the world. All this created the “myth” of Berlin, which compliant media helped to amplify even after the fall of the Wall, when things in reality began to change, and not a little (except for the drugs). But that is enough. In the collective imagination, Berlin has remained the city of the “possible”, where everything is permitted and transgression is the order of the day. Which is certainly still true, at least in part. What is no longer true is the fact that it is a land of milk and honey. Quite the contrary… However, for the reasons stated above, it remains an element of irresistible attraction for the young, who are drawn to it like bees to honey, mistaking multiculturalism (multi-kulti) for egalitarianism. It is not true that we are all equal; if anything we have the same rights, in a rule of law, but each with our own characteristics and abilities that make us unique and unrepeatable individuals. For these young people, the open society of Popperian memory is another totem, failing to understand that cosmopolitanism is quite a different thing from homogenisation, and that differences should if anything be preserved and not erased in the name of a hypocritical welcome. If one looks at official statistics, the highest percentage of Berlin residents is precisely the generation between 25 and 45 years old, that is, exactly the “Millennials” spoken of at the beginning of this long article. What better field for a social experiment could one find for someone wishing to “test” the suggestibility, or even the manipulation, of a youth demographic rendered “sensitive” over time to messages of social empathy and, indeed, to civil or ecological issues? And it is never a coincidence that the largest slice of the electorate for the Grüne, the German Greens, falls precisely into the same age bracket. A tiny separate chapter should be devoted to the young Italians present in Germany, particularly in the Capital. I shall refrain from making comments on specific individuals, whom I could well cite, both “influencers” and not, to draw a merciful veil over people who display a nauseating pedantry, contradictory in their “ideas”, and of an abysmal ignorance, in the technical sense of the term and otherwise.

Anti… something and Sardines aplenty

Greta’s is not the only movement that has set the younger generations in motion. Recently in Italy, in fact, there was that of the so-called “Sardines”. Born “shove-taneously” (no, it is not a spelling mistake, spintaneamente from spinta, a push), it manifested itself as a breath of air against the big bad ogre, the “boogeyman” as they would say in Rome, the antichrist of Italian politics, namely Matteo Salvini, former Minister of the Interior and political head of the Lega. Notice to sailors: I am not a Lega supporter, I never was nor will I ever be, so any polemics or labels one might wish to pin on me (as has already been done) would miss the point of the issue I am raising entirely, and are a waste of time. My personal political judgement on the character in question, whilst being as negative as that towards all the other major political leaders of our wretched Country, is not relevant to this argument. The theme is not in fact Salvini or Meloni, but rather the ideas behind those who would like to oppose them. That is to say, absolute nothingness. Personally, I believe that this “movement” and those four little characters brought to prominence by our homegrown, power-sucking media, are the fruit of an international financial elite that has well understood that the parties—particularly the PD—which until now have, so to speak, pulled the cart of the neo-liberal message masked as “left-wing” values, no longer hoodwink an exhausted populace, worn out by years of economic harassment and intellectual swindles, quite as well as they used to. The stomach has no ears, as Cato the Censor used to say. When you pull the rope too tight, you risk breaking it for good. And the antiphon sung by the parties in the service of big international capital has almost reached the end of its cycle, the bluff of the Five Stars having also come to light, a party created at a desk to harness the people’s anger. Therefore, what is to be done? And here is the rabbit pulled out of the hat of the wise father of the Homeland (one of many) Romano Prodi, the architect on two occasions of Berlusconi’s defeat (the other “boogeyman” defeated in the past by the aforementioned “left-wing” party). If the parties no longer pull in the crowds, let’s bet on the young as a driving force. Et voilà, out are pulled four thirty-somethings, captained by Mattia Santori, nicknamed by malicious tongues “the curls with nothing underneath”, who on the occasion of the last regional elections, primarily those of the last PD stronghold, Emilia Romagna, worked very hard to rally a slumbering “left-wing” populace that by now seems little attracted by the broken party sirens (another generation of 30-to-50-year-olds reared specifically to take the place of the old PCI leaders, by now a very pale memory for a few). An incredible media campaign was waged by our compliant media. The four horsemen of the apocalypse were invited everywhere, as if they were great political experts, only to make incredible slip-ups like the famous photo with Luciano Benetton and Oliviero Toscani. Having almost fallen into oblivion, they were recently exhumed, what a coincidence, by Lilli Gruber on an episode of Otto e mezzo. Preparations are underway for the post-Coronavirus era. They will be needed, given the trend, especially economically, that our Country is taking following the at best disastrous decisions of Giuseppi’s current Government. A little pearl from Santori was the brilliant idea of a “horizontal wealth tax, guaranteed by the Government”. Which is to say: few ideas, but confused ones. Anyway, the idea of a wealth tax was also brought up again by another paladin of “left-wing” neo-thinking, the genius of Italian gastro-philosophy Oskar Farinetti (a great friend of the líder máximo, whose consensus is now waning, but who remains a great political strategist, Matteo Renzi). To sum up, they have forged individuals with fragile psyches (many young people are forced to resort to psychotherapeutic treatments), unaccustomed to problematising reality, and thrust a mobile phone into their hands (to tell the truth, they thrust it into all of our hands), through which they send daily impulses directing them towards specific directions. A gigantic test of Pavlovian memory. In short, a pretty picture emerges from an examination of the generation that is supposed to lead our world in this period of pandemics, fake or otherwise. The lance that I said at the beginning I felt like breaking in favour of these young people is not, in fact, directed at the majority, but if anything at a small minority belonging to it, which does make some effort to understand the reality surrounding it, beyond the sung mass and the easy ready meals laid out for them. They try to do it, even if often (but not always) they do not possess all the adequate cultural tools. They are people who at least make the effort to see beyond the obvious, not settling for the mainstream narrative and the relative bombardment to which they are subjected daily. They have curiosity, they search. Even to see the other side of the Moon. They are the only hope we have left.